GURU Blog - Page #2

Advice for a seaside reading

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Monday, 08 August 2016 16:31; Written by Guru Advisor

While you are lying on a hot beach (as I hope) or in a lone office updating systems of a client (as I fear), why don’t you stay update reading GURU advisor?

Despite being quite hot, this month too we have prepared plenty of news.
We keep on talking about Managed Service Providers by presenting a detailed coverage of a simple and functional platform for MSP, available for free at least for its fundamental features (Comodo One).

We then deal with one of the most important software for any technicians, sysadmin or company that providers support services to its client: remote control. Although TeamViewer is the leading solution in this sector, there are plenty of alternatives and in some cases they surpasses in terms of ease of use, features and compatibility. We have tried 10 different products that belong to the category and we’ve compared every feature in an all-encompassing table. We hope it can help you to determine whether the product you use is suitable for the purpose: naturally it’s hard to pick a winner, as basic requirements changes according to the type of use you’re going to do and to the number of technicians or sessions you need.

If you are using cloud technologies for your company or are evaluating third-party services, then you’ll have thought for sure about the difficulties you might encounter while evaluating a contract from a technical and, mostly, legal perspective. This month our lawyer tells us what we must be aware of while reading such contracts and which clauses in particular should catch our attention, both in positive and negative. Naturally, from a legal profile, it’s better to look for an Italian provider, as you will see.

Many of you ask us about the hosting world: this month we have taken into account the most used providers in the world and in Europe and compared a basic hosting plan suitable to run a Wordpress website: you will discover prices and the (scarce) technical information available for each service.

Lastly, while waiting for VMworld USA, which starts at the end of this month, we have interviewed Rodolfo Rotondo from VMware and talked about the future and the new “hardware” for our applications: he says it’s called Cloud..

Rules you ought to know

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Monday, 08 August 2016 16:31; Written by Guru Advisor

It might sound strange, but it really is one of the strength points of GURU advisor: all the people writing and collaborating with this publication work in the IT world. We aren’t talking about journalists with a past as editors, writers keen on computers or brilliant and willing college student. All the people that write and collaborate with us work concretely with a commitment - maybe not a full time one - in the IT world. And that’s truly an added value for GURU advisor: nobody of us pretends to be an expert, nobody talks about something that doesn’t know in practice.
It’s not odd that we published an issue in August but not in September, save for the due updates from the VMworld. We return this month with an issue with lots of news, amongst those a number of new article on VMware vSphere. It has been a long time since we last added contents in this section, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.

In this issue you’ll also find the 7 golden rules on how to make good backups. Unfortunately this activity, which is fundamental for any company, is often underestimated. I hope you won’t find anything new when reading the article!

We’ve investigated the technologies behind online meetings, webinars and conferences. The offering is vast but it’s quite hard to understand what are the products we’re actually looking for in terms of budget and features. An in-depth comparison table will help you to quickly check the characteristics of these products.
This month too our lawyer will help us to understand better about the Cloud world in order to leverage it and, who knows, maybe start a new business.

Have a good reading!
Ciao!

Server, container or datacenter?

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Monday, 08 August 2016 16:31; Written by Filippo Moriggia

In a world in such a rapid evolution like the IT world, even operating systems are becoming obsolete. Some years ago the release of a new version of Windows Server was an epochal event, these days the width of change is way reduced and it’s perceived more as an integration to the previous versions rather than a turning point.

There are still a lot of new features for this new Windows Server 2016 that we cover in this issue, and perhaps the only real change is about the new licensing model that changes to keep pace with new processors that offer tens of cores. The second big news is the introduction of container, one of the hottest and most talked technologies in the IT sphere.

Containers represents a possible evolution, and by all means a different way of leveraging them, of the virtualization technologies we all know, and also an innovation that can make life easier in particular to developers. It’s not a phenomenon with the same range of virtualization or the Cloud. VMs, as a matter of fact, are part of the daily routine of every sysadmin, while Containers are a solution best suited to DevOps environments.

The actual bricks of the IT world of the future won’t be neither servers, VMs nor Containers: datacenters will be. In order to reach an higher level of reliability we will have to group different datacenters in a sort of “set” of Cloud that allows the reachability of such reliability, just as RAID, some years ago, dramatically changed the concept of data reliability itself.

Among the news of this issue, I’d like to note that we have two new sections devoted, respectively, to events related to the IT world and to the main news from the Datacenter and Cloud, Security and Content Management Systems (CMS, like Joomla and WordPress) sector. As you know we don’t have the utopistic goal of telling you in real time everything that happens in a such quick world as the IT one, so we’ll select the main news for you.

One month to the goal line: Windows 10 prepares to celebrates its first anniversary

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Wednesday, 29 June 2016 17:45; Written by Filippo Moriggia

It has been almost a year since the announcement of the availability of Windows 10, the one that, according to Microsoft, will be the last release of an operating system (what will be from now onwards, are only updates). The most recent statistics are about 350 million devices equipped with it (as an upgrade or sold with 10 on board). In the last 50 days, stats are about an average of 1 million installations each day. The free update option should end in late July, and many people are acting to be prepared to this deadline.

Is Windows 10 ready for the Corporate/Enterprise world? Yes, for sure; as for most operating systems from the Redmond colossus, most critical problems are fixed within 6 months from the release date, therefore we shouldn’t expect any surprise about that. In order to help you to understand the potentialities and promises of the update, in this issue of GURU advisor you’ll find an in-depth article about security technologies used by Windows 10.

The update to Windows 10 is not mandatory, and, regardless being free, it can’t be taken with little care. The problem, as in most cases, is not the OS itself but the hardware. Upgrading on a previous generation machine could lead to several issues: non existent drivers, unsupported devices, worse performances than expected and plenty of bugs that can complicate the user experience more than expected. In such case, it’s better to opt to buy a new PC or to do an upgrade (ie. more RAM or an SSD unit in place of a spinning disk).

Even more news for GURU advisor

Details: Category: GURU blog; Published: Monday, 23 May 2016 10:08; Written by Filippo Moriggia

It feels like yesterday that GURU advisor went online, and we’ve already published issue 8.. What do you expect in the upcoming months? We have plenty of ideas that we are developing as quick as possible. We’ll soon add a page dedicated to event in the IT world: seminars, fairs, product presentations, courses, webinars. I invite you to send us your recommendations at the email address This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Another argument we really feel is about Managed Service Providers: in our vision, product and software resellers representing the spine of the IT world now have to evolve with an approach closer to the cloud. Becoming a service provider capable of taking on all the company needs in spite of an all-embracing monthly fee. This approach requires both a different way of working and interacting with clients and specific tools that can help the overall management. In this sense, the United States are way ahead than us, so there are many products of this kind that we’d like to talk about. In the next issues we will focus on these topics and provide further information to let you understand pros and cons of such approach.

Naturally every time one faces a different business model it’s important to ponder about legal aspects, too. And not only that: lots of you are perhaps thinking about moving your clients’ machines into the cloud and directly or indirectly managing them with a single tenant or multitenant architecture, and would like to understand whether to obey some laws or regulation in order to proceed. Some others suggested to pay the ransom for a ransomware attack while not being really conscious about possible consequences. Everytime we talk about these (and others) topics it’s really important to understand, from a legal standpoint, what is the best approach in order not to incur in risks or even felonies (like paying a ransom!), thus avoiding to put your business at risk.
Starting with the next issue,a lawyer will help us with some specific articles, trying to explain us in the clearest and simplest way the different topics.
If you have any questions regarding the subject, feel free to ask us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

And now, enjoy this shiny new issue 8!